DRUM (11/9/12): Just in case you haven't read this yet, here's a remarkable statistic: even if Romney had won Ohio, Florida, and Virginia, he still would have lost. This makes it all the weirder that he and his team were so sure they were going to win all the way to the end. After all, it's plausible that if turnout had been slightly different he could have reeled in those three states, which he lost by only two or three points. But which state would have been the fourth? Pennsylvania? He lost it by 5 points. Colorado? 5 points. New Hampshire? 6 points. Iowa? 6 points. Nevada? 7 points. Wisconsin? 7 points. What possible turnout models could they have been cooking up in their back rooms that convinced them any of those states were truly in play?

Aside from the fact that the New York Times has politely reported the claim as a fact, why should anyone believe that Romney and his team “were sure they were going to win all the way to the end?”

Are we supposed to believe that claim just because Team Romney says it?

When Romney unexpectedly scheduled a last-weekend visit to Pennsylvania, everyone agreed that this was most likely an act of desperation. Now, Romney Land spreads the claim that they were shocked, just shocked, when they lost Tuesday night—and we stampede to accept this claim as an established fact. (At this point, we're also throwing Kevin's commenters under the bus.)

Why should people believe this claim? For ourselves, we have no idea.

A bit of historical context: The GOP always invents a tale, or a set of tales, which help explain away defeat. Example:

In 1992, exit polls showed that Perot voters would have split evenly between Clinton and Bush. But the GOP began spreading the claim that Perot cost Bush the election.

This tale is now widely accepted as fact. Just yesterday, we heard a graduate school type at the bagel joint announcing this fact to a group of friends with whom he gathers weekly.

It may be the liberal world's greatest skill: adopting the face-saving claims of the GOP. Given the weird logic patterns of the current GOP, the claim that Romney believed he was going to win may be the latest example.

94 comments:

"It may be the liberal world's greatest skill: adopting the face-saving of the GOP."

Using Kevin Drum as your sole example viz. a NY Times article to support this claim? Drum bought Bushco's. Saddam-has-nukes b*llsh*t and felt we couldn't invade Iraq fast enough. He believes the GOP bs about the "Grand Bargain" to this day.

Kevin Drum isn't the sole example of accepting the GOP narrative -- he is the sole example questioning it. A lot of the blogs were talking about Romney's late concession and the belief that he was going to win Ohio (as Rove suggested on Fox). On many of the blogs I was reading on election night, people didn't understand how and why the various states were being called so early -- people don't understand polling, sampling, and use of exit polls as proxy for vote counting. So the meme seems plausible to a lot of people. It didn't make sense to me because even subtracting Ohio's electoral votes (at the point it was called for Obama), Obama already has more than 270 (on CBS). Some of the other channels & papers had slightly different counts but the point remains the same -- there didn't seem to be a pathway for Romney to win even if he took the remaining states with close outcomes. Drum pointed it out first, not last.

You can never read someone's mind, so no one can claim to know what someone else truly believed. But this seems like very different spin than "Perot cost us the election". This spin is "we were so naive that we assumed that we could unskew the polls and then we'd be winning". The aides pushing this could be lying. But they also work in campaigns for a living, and we assume they'd like to get hired again. "We foolishly refused to believe the polls" seems like an awfully bad thing to have on your resume. What is their upside for telling this tale?

What about Colorado? That wasn't in yet as I recall, and the win was only 3.7 percentage points. Those three states (Ohio, Fla, Va) plus Colorado would have put Romney in. So maybe it wasn't totally delusional at the time.

Tough years ahead for Bob. The Democrats and MSNBC and others haven't listened to a word he has said for years, and haven't changed their strategies or attitudes one iota ---- and the Dems have won yet another major electoral victory and are achieving realignment. ALL WITHOUT HEEDING ONE WORD OF BOB'S!!

Which approach would you bet on in the future, given demographic and political shifts? Bob's racism-minimizing, cracker-coddling? His insistence on trying to win over old bigots who have no interest in being persuaded?

Or the strategies and approaches that have now won 3 of 4 national elections, all routs, in a more diverse America?

I have always thought the main thing Bob has been talking about is how the so-called liberal press has become lazy,unprofessional and not all that liberal. After years of right wingers accusing the liberal press of bias they reacted by bending over backwards to appear fair and they did it by reverting to he said she said journalism instead of finding the truth and letting it lead where it leads. Also the running narrative that occurs when reporters start quoting other reporters instead of doing the actual work of verifying facts and reporting those facts has lead to our present day piss poor media and Bob has been saying as much from day one. Yeah he has his "ways" but he sure seems to work hard at showing examples to prove his main point. If he never makes a difference so be it. At least he is trying and I think its a damn good thing. This blog has never been about democrats winning but about the press doing their job so that we can have a democracy where people have a chance to understand what they are voting for. If the truth is presented to the public I am still naive enough to think that is the best way for the democrats or liberals to prevail.

Don't be ridiculous, Bob. As one of the many Anonymouses in your comments sections says above, "we were so naive that we assumed that we could unskew the polls and then we'd be winning" is preposterous as spin. It's a confession of incompetence of the sort only uttered by people who are gob-smacked.

Look up the now famous clip of Karl Rove having a meltdown on Fox when they called Ohio for Romney and tell us you think that was spin of some kind.

You've become so addicted to sneering at other liberals, you've become just as blind to reality as the Romney people.

I'm with Bob on this. Astute observers understand that Romney has lied consistently about almost everything throughout the course of this election. We've been amazed at the way the mainstream media has let him get away with most of his lies. But for some reason, when he acts like he thinks he really can win, we're suddenly supposed to believe he's being truthful? Come on, guys. If Romney had spent the last week of the election publicly saying, "Well, we're probably not going to win, but gosh, I sure hope folks still go out and vote for me," he would have guaranteed himself instant pariah status within his political sphere. Not only would that kind of defeatism have removed his last tiny possibility of winning, but it would have undermined Republican turnout efforts and potentially caused the party to experience greater losses in both houses of Congress. He absolutely had to keep putting on the best face right up until the bitter end, because even if his own fate was already assured, the Congressional races were still in play and almost certainly would have been affected by the party's leader expressing an early surrender. And given the practical necessity of lying about his expectations, what do you expect him to do after the election? It's not like he can come out and admit, "Yep. I was lying when I said I thought I'd win. I admit that I'm a liar."

Is the question even modestly interesting except on a human interest level? A more interesting question might be, didn't it seem The Daily Howler quite oftenthought Romney might win, and how was his reasoning? Often, I would say, fairly faulty. He was highly dubious on weather the 47 per centthing would work for Obama, it certainly seemed like it did. Hitting Romney on his taxesseemed to work too. On this ghastly political playing field mostly bought and paid for by Republicans, Obama managed to prevail, even after a performance few would cheer. This took some hardball, something beautiful losers like Al Gore simply couldn't master.

Didn't Al Gore actually win not just the popular vote but the electoral as well had all the votes in Florida been counted? I will never call Al Gore a loser and those that do just are not very good at history. How quick we forget.

Al Gore was the most qualified, most prepared non-incumbent candidate for president that I ever voted for.

As well as one of the least charismatic.

That is an inconvenient truth (pardon the pun) that Somerby and his followers can't seem to wrap their lizard brains around as they seek to blame Maureen Dowd, Kit Seelye and the whole Beltway press corps for the War on Gore.

Now was that A factor in Gore's defeat? Sure. Was it THE factor? Hardly. Far worse things were said about Clinton in both his presidential elections and he managed to win. And far worse things were said about Obama, and here he is still standing.

Please allow me to throw out another factor which I believe is at least as large as the War on Gore, and I will say it in just two words: Joe Lieberman.

No, far worse things were not said about Obama, at least not by mainstream sources. That's the whole point of the "War on Gore": it was waged by the mainstream media, which makes it something unique in recent electoral politics. They picked a side and relentlessly worked for it (or against it, if you prefer Bob's construct). As for "lizard brains," I've always found that the loudest "Gore sucked as a candidate who ran a lousy campaign" mouths were also the biggest Dem homers around, besides the media people themselves.

Yep. The whole Rev. Wright thing, the "Born in Kenya" bit, the "educated in radical Muslim schools" thing, and let's not forget "palling around with terrorists" --- all those things don't even approach the meanness of Gore's three-piece suits.

And yes, all of the above were very much repeated in the "mainstream" press.

The big difference was, Obama himself dealt with the lies told about him. Very effectively. Gore did not.

And this is why Obama won't have some buddy from college whining in a blog 12 years from now about his loss and about how no one rode to his rescue.

Anon 9:26, I think you are missing a significant distinction. When the MSM repeated the right wing propaganda about Obama, e.g he's a Muslim, the ridiculed the propaganda, while with Gore the MSM advanced and advocated for the legitimacy of the lies.

Al Gore faced an unusual set of circumstances, and I agree the Daily Howler that the National Press was bound to make him pay for Clinton's sins, real and imagined. But when thing he never did was strike back, effectively, at his critics and go after W as the creep he was and is. He played it classy, and it gave him a victory so slender he couldn't protect from the post election steal, see "same problem." See Howard Fineman's piece of last week about how Obama degraded the Presidency with his tacky low road approach (no examples given, of course). Often during the campaign, The Daily Howler seemed on the same page as Fineman.

I'm really curious about this myself. I've always thought Rove was wildly overrated (anyone whose brilliance the MSM praises simply can't be really bright, because in reality the MSM hates truly gifted people), plus he's a pure hack, so him getting it wrong doesn't surprise me at all. But the Romney people are supposed to be professionals -- surely they knew what was going on? You could take Excel, slam the publicly available poll numbers into it, run a few Monte Carlo sims, and you knew Romney was in deep trouble. The betting sites all had him in trouble. How could he and his team NOT know? Did he run one of those organizations where negative thoughts aren't allowed, sort of a magical thinking campaign, where everyone massaged the numbers to make them look good to keep people positive? Or are they just lying now? They're saying the trip to Penn was because they thought they were in a position to "stretch the playing field," like Obama did in Ind in '08. It's possible, I suppose, but a professional organization ought to have known better. If they're telling the truth they're incompetent; if they're lying, it really makes you wonder why. Hopefully the truth will eventually come out, but Romney and truth really don't go well together. Or frequently.

According to the Washington Post, the Romney campaign hit every single benchmark they set for turning out their own vote, and they were confident that the restriction of early voting hours in Ohio and Florida would deliver those votes, and hoped that confusion over Voter ID laws in Pennsylvania might suppress the vote there.

What stunned them, however, was the willingness of urban voters to stand in line for hours to vote for Obama. In other words, that light at the end of the tunnel was a pretty long freight train.

This is why Karl Rove threw such a hissy fit. Nothing in his models told him that urban Ohio voters were going to turn out like they did on election day. It was presumed that Obama voters in the cities had already early-voted, and he was counting on the election day vote swinging it for Romney. In fact, they were certain of it.

And another thing they didn't count on. Cuban-Americans in Florida favored Obama, though not by much. But this time they did not give Romney the solid support that other Republican candidates had gotten before him, and that swung Florida to Obama, despite polls showing Romney with an ever-so-small lead there.

And yet another factor, Catholics once again mirrored the general population, voting 50-48 for Obama. The Romney campaign was certain that the whole "religious liberty" campaign conducted by the U.S. bishops over birth control would deliver far greater support among Catholics than it did.

Well, white conservative Catholics voted Republican like they always have done since Nixon in '72, but they were absolutely swamped by Hispanic Catholics, who are making up an ever increasing portion of the Catholic Church in America.

That's all great, but this stuff was captured in the polling. For them to adopt this mindset requires that the polls be all wrong. The voter suppression stuff might -- might -- nudge the polls off by a fraction of a percent, but they needed 3 - 5%, depending on the state, to actually win this thing.

One of the themes that ought to emerge from this -- Krugman is beginning to push it already -- is that these business types don't, in reality, know all that much about numbers. They know how to schmooze, and tickle money out of the pockets of the gullible, maybe draw up impressive-looking PowerPoint presentations, but they don't, in reality, know numbers.

Romney is the archetype of the modern businessman, a guy who made hundreds of millions of dollars without actually creating anything himself, and he was a fucking moron about polls that any college kid who's taken intro to statistics could decipher. Maybe, just maybe, it's time for us to re-examine our elites, take a good, hard look at them, and figure out what it is that makes them elite.

"This tale is now widely accepted as fact. Just yesterday, we heard a graduate school type at the bagel joint announcing this fact to a group of friends with whom he gathers weekly."

Well, Bob. I guess if you heard it from a "graduate school type at the bagel joint" then it must be "widely accepted as fact."

Puhleeze! Go sell that bullroar to the people who think you are a serious analyst.

You do remember, Bob. You were the guy who tried to dismiss the whole bullying in prep school tale as poorly sourced because the reporter failed to quote a single person saying, "Yeah, we did it because he was gay."

And now we have the sudden appearance of a "graduate school type at the bagel joint" as your sole source of "evidence" that the Perot cost Bush I the election fable must be "widely accepted."

Can you even begin to realize that the same story could be just as widely unaccepted? How do I know? Well, I heard a plumber type at McDonald's just the other day talking about how silly it was.

yeah, right. the ONLY evidence that people think Perot cost papa Bush is whatever Bob mentioned. of course, thats not so. Unlike yiur own made-up anecdote, Somerbys is reflected in the real world. spend some time with the google, bright boy!

No, the only evidence Bob cites for proclaiming the Perot fable as "widely selected" is a single grad school type in a bagel joint.

Once again, Somerby commits the very sin he has spent years accusing others of.

But on further relfection, perhaps Bob's premise all this time has been correct.

Certainly if you are fool enough to accept Bob's narrative based on such flimsy evidence, then perhaps there are millions just as stupid as you are who cling to favorite stories just because they feel good.

Which opens another point: What does "widely accepted" even mean? Believed by 100 percent of the population? 90 percent? 50 percent? 10 percent? Or just some grad school type sitting in a bagel joint 20 years later.

As I wrote before, a story can be "widely accepted" and "widely unaccepted" at the same time. For example, it can be said that the story that LBJ conspired with the CIA, FBI, Castro, the Mafia and the military-industrial complex to bump off JFK can be said to be "widely accepted." Hell, Oliver Stone even did a movie about it.

But it is also "widely unaccepted" among sane people. Again, wrap your lizard brain around that concept.

Sir, I hear the "major party candidate X would have won election but for third party candidate Y" argument presented often enough and always treated as reasonable. The grassy knoll folks get treated the same as the people who start lunchroom conversations about Area 51 and how the Apollo moon landing was faked. Smile and back away slowly. Just because someone mentions the most recent time they heard this discussion doesn't imply it's the only time they've heard it.

Over the years, I've heard the "Clinton would have lost except for Perot" thing more times than I can count, usually, oddly enough, from liberals trying to discredit Clinton, although I've also heard it from conservatives trying to discredit Clinton. Basically, if you don't like Clinton, you probably believe it, has been my experience. I'm expecting to hear it from Obama's fandom, as a means of propping Obama up, something along the lines of "The first Democrat to win re-election without a third party candidate since Truman (or LBJ, depending on how dishonest they are)!" or something like it.

Johnson didn't win re-election. He was not elected in 1963, he merely served out the balance of Kennedy's term. '64 was the only Presidential election he won (he was elected as Kennedy's VP in 1960. He chose not to run for re-election in 1968 due to unpopularity of the Vietnam War.

And I highly recommend this story to anyone else interested in the media's affect on politics. It comes from overseas, of course. Also, a lot of good political reporting is done on business sites. You'd expect them to be horribly biased, but a lot of them do good work. But then, they're dealing with real money, so they actually care if they get things right.

Great article, but I got a small quibble with a tangential point which I will get to later.

But first, the meat:

"If I were one of Obama’s press officers I would have been offering up a silent prayer of thanks that Fox was devoting so much time and energy to the Benghazi story. Because that provided the Democrats with their best way of keeping the issue compartmentalised."

Exactly. And further down:

"As we saw with Benghazi, rather than try to penetrate mainstream media outlets, there was a clear tendency for Romney advisers to do easy "hand-offs" to Fox on issues they wanted up and running. It reminded me of when we in the Labour Party used to just drop our best material in the laps of the Mirror; they would run it big, and we’d think we were talking to the whole country. In fact, we were talking almost entirely to our own supporters."

Bingo. Fox was beating this horse to death, and it was a story few people outside their bubble believed and even fewer cared about. And all the time wasted on Benghazi was time spent off jobs and the economy (remember Carville!) where Obama was most vulnerable.

Now my quibble: Karl Rove didn't convince Fox or anybody else to pull the call of Florida, and I will never forget that night.

First, based on exit polls, all the networks called Florida for Gore. Then it turned out that the vote from Palm Beach (home of the butterfly ballot) wasn't coming in as strong for Gore (and much stronger for Buchanan) than anybody thought possible, that Bush was also stronger among Hispanic voters (remember Elian Gonzalez) than expected.

So all the networks pulled their call for Gore. Then along into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, all the networks called Florida for Bush, and that is when I shut off the TV and went to bed.

Then I awoke the next morning to find that the call had been pulled again after the Miami-Dade and Broward County vote rolled in, and that mere hundreds of votes separated the two, with lots of absentees to be counted as well as a certain recanvass of all counties, and what should have been a certain statewide recount.

These accounts strike this reader as far too subtle -- just more horse-race blather.

Why did a president who isn't particularly popular and has delivered very little to ordinary people as of yet (though, to be fair, the subsidies in Obamacare should make life much more pleasant for tens of millions of Americans), get re-elected at a time of at least 10-12% actual unemployment and declining net worth?

It's not the economy, stupid, it's demographics. Repubs can't pander to the nativist white vote and seduce Latinos at the same time. They can't appeal to resentful retirees and unemployed college grads at the same time. They can't reject pay equity and outlaw abortion and expect to attract women voters at the same time. It's one or the other.

And, going with the "other" guarantees they'll lose virtually every national election from this point on. And it's only going to get worse, as the country becomes less white and less parochial.

Any sitting President who manages only 37% of the vote for reelection, regardless of a third party, is a no excuse loser. The way I've heard that election discussed over the years in the media, "Perot cost Bush the election" is probably the riding so-called conventional wisdom.

Here we go again. Try a google search for "Perot cost Bush the election" and have fun reading. I found this one interesting (www.pollingreports.com/hibbitts1202.htm ) since it cites a 2012 Politico article advancing this thesis and mentions Rush Limbaugh as someone who keeps pushing the story. Yes, the articles you will find serve to debunk this tale, but they take the position that this is what Krugman would call a "zombie lie". No matter how many times it's disproven, it keeps coming back. Which IMHO qualifies it as conventional wisdom.

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